Jair Bolsanaro has just capped off a most tumultuous month.  Surviving an leftist assassination attempt in September, 2018, the former Brazilian army officer and long time congressman has blown through a primary, then, run off election,  with a crushing defeat of his socialist opponent.   Brazil,  a country that has been dominated by socialist populist rule since its military dictatorship was overcome in the 1980s,  has been drawn to Bolsanaro’s message of a nationalist socially conservative agenda of privatization, gun rights, and law and order.   A surge of support from Brazilians tired of seeing corruption and stilted progress dominate the government of their massive country,  has now catapulted a traditionalist conservative to the very pinnacle of power.

Beginning with the stunning Brexit win in Great Britain in the summer of 2016, followed by the ascendancy of the Trump phenomena in the United States, the world has been rocked from its globalist moorings by election reactions of democracies towards more nationalist overtones.  No continent cohabitant with democratic process has been spared.  A supposedly unified Europe has seen strong elective resistance to trans-national European Union overlords, in Poland, Italy, Hungary, and Austria.  North America has seen nationalists win in Mexico, and most dramatically, the United States.  Now, South America, watching the real time suicide of a once prosperous Venezuela under the boot of disastrous socialist autocracy, has seen its largest country radically swing away from any dalliance with the virus that has strangled the Venezuelan prosperity.

At the turn of the century, there was a brief communal awareness that perhaps the world had, with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 seen the “end of history”, with global coordination of borderless trade positioning governments to remove the concept of borders altogether.   A dominant military superpower in the United States allowed bureaucrats to resist developing national power structures in favor bureaucrats who would reign by regulation rather than martial projection of power.  The need for national exceptionalism was to progressively give way to global universality dominated by an intellectual elite that would bypass the need for borders by eliminating the cultural uniqueness that in their mind supported inequality through border separateness.  Globalist thought saw borders as an anachronism, and therefore, encouraged removal of any impediments to immigration, to further blend the cultural soup into an indistinguishable compote.   A post religion, post language, post inequity world was in sight, where martial energies could be directed toward global dragons such as “climate change” and “redistribution”.   The wrenching effect on individuals of enforced cultural change, derision of time honored traditions, and a feeling that their way of life was wantonly considered an  “acceptable” sacrifice on the altar of a ‘better’ future never entered into globalist calculations.

The first reactionary slap was the fundamentalist violent recoil of radical Islam on 09/11.  Despite the transient collective national response to the attack, the left almost immediately sought to demonize an aggressive national reaction , and sought to invent a rationalization that would seek global bureaucratic “legal” recourse to terrorism, rather than military destruction of terrorists.  Despite the enormous associated risks, global bureaucracies stuck to  the stated goal of unfettered immigration, regardless  of the obvious risk to their citizens  of additionally allowing the virus of radicalism, terrorism, and destruction of rule of law to proceed apace.  With the election of Barrack Obama, the bastion home of the clarion call for sovereignty, limited government, and individual freedoms, the United States, was now positioned to lose its exceptionalism, and be assimilated to the future, like its European forebears themselves.

Historical dissonance once driven too far into an unnatural human posture, inevitably leads to reactionary strains, and we are in one now.  The only consensus that currently exists is that there can be no consensus between a increasingly globalist, social uniformity championed by the left, and a large and growing reactionary pull back toward traditional virtues and competitive national stories.   I can’t see that this division, so intensely demanded by the proponents of each future, will somehow end in comity.  The recent hysterical outrages claimed by the left, and the progressive successes on the right in the ballot box only intensifies the divide.  

Unfortunately, a chasm is developing, and the first violent outbursts and simmering hatreds are beginning to find root.  Violence at the periphery from the disaffected is increasingly finding its way to more and more dramatic expression.  The left has never accepted the idea that the “arc of history towards social justice” could ever be thwarted.  The threat of violence has been the left’s tool for ultimate submission of those who do not see the future the way they do.  The reaction in the not so distant past to the violent tendencies of the over reaching left, has been in past times an equally over reaching right.   We will see if the skill set of such men as Trump and Bolsanaro prove up to the task of ably setting things right, without resorting to pulling as far right as the left has pulled left.  If they are not savvy enough, pressure pot may boil over, and we all might unfortunately end up looking back to this tumultuous time, as the quiet before the storm.